Thought controlled machines
How stuff works
article on thought controlled wheelchairs.
Physicist Stephen Hawkings uses a wheelchair that is very advanced and even speaks on his behalf once he has formulated a sentence using minimalistic movement of his finger on his right hand.
The thought controlled wheelchair uses subvocal speech.
Ambient Audeo System
Michael Callahan and Thomas Coleman founded Ambient, the company that develops and markets the Audeo system. Audeo was initially envisioned as a way for severely disabled people to communicate, but Ambient expanded the control systems to include the ability to control a wheelchair or interact with a computer
Keyboard shortcuts database!
Keyxl is a neat collection of keyboard shortcuts. Checked out for Word 2003 and discovered many things that were somehow not 'findable' so far.
Open Source software links
Some nice links to useful open source software
- Huge collection (categorized) from mashable. Called 'Open Source God'
- Open source as alternative (osalt) has open source comparisons for commercial ones.
- Digitaldarknet has another collection.
Timetracker
Timetracker is an open source tool for monitoring where the time goes. Very good for checking personal productivity and identifying time wasters.
TimeTracker (TT) is a PC activity monitor. TT will determine every second which window is currently active on your desktop. TT captures the window caption from the title bar and tracks the active time for that window. Custom tasks may also be added.
Technology review videos
For those who have a good broadband connection, try out the
Technology Review videos (published by MIT). Good stuff - on different emerging technologies
Dojo Foundation - Open Source Toolkit
Press release on Dojo 1.0
Dojo provides easy-to-use, high-quality UI components and JavaScript infrastructure critical for building responsive Web applications without the need for proprietary plugins or single-vendor solutions. Only 25K in size, the base of Dojo delivers key support for Ajax, progressive enhancement, animations, and opens the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers.
The Dojo project has attracted a talented and vibrant community of individuals and corporate supporters since its founding in 2004. Dojo is a key part of products from active community members like AOL, BEA (NASDAQ: BEAS), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA), and many others.
IBM uses Dojo in a number of products including WebSphere Commerce and its popular mashup maker, QEDWiki. "Dojo enabled IBM to create user interfaces that are internationalized and accessible out of the box, which helps us to deliver projects much faster and with more value to our customers," said David Boloker, CTO for Emerging Technologies, IBM Software Group
MIT's opencourseware now has video search
MIT Researchers Advance Lecture Capture with Search Capabilities. A
Report from the journal.
The functionality of MIT's new technology shares a little in common with traditional search technology from a user perspective. That is, if you enter in a search term, the system calls up a list of results, along with relevant details, such as the title of the lecture, running time, highlighted search terms within the results, etc. And that's where the similarity ends. From this point, clicking on any word within the results calls up not only the relevant lecture, but takes the user to the precise point in the lecture where that term is used.
Identity Management and Protection
Centre for Identity Management and Protection
website has some ongoing research work in the important area of identity management and also provides links to some whitepapers on the topic.
Popfly review
Microsoft offers
popfly - a tool for creating mashups. Etech's review on it
here.
Example of what can be done:
Mix and re-mix photos and videos. Popfly makes it easy to create and share beautiful slideshows using pictures from Flickr, Windows Live Spaces, Facebook or to embed a podcast or a video player hosting videos from Soapbox or YouTube and share it on your Facebook profile, Windows Live Spaces page, or any Web page.
